The Category That Outlived Everyone Who Built It
Google's Fitbit Air is being called WHOOP like, but screen-less wrist tracking dates to 2011. The category outlived its pioneers, and that history deserves more than a footnote.
The tech press had a predictable reaction to the Fitbit Air last week. Google's new screenless wrist tracker, priced at $99, was immediately framed as a WHOOP competitor, a response to WHOOP's dominance, a sign that WHOOP had changed the wearables game. Multiple outlets called the form factor "WHOOP-like" without apparent irony.
That framing isn't wrong, exactly. It's just roughly 15 years incomplete.
In 2011, a San Francisco company called Jawbone released the UP, a screenless rubber band worn on the wrist that tracked your steps, your sleep, and your activity, and showed you none of it until you opened an app on your phone. No display. No notifications. Just a sensor, a band, and a bet that people would want to understand their bodies without being interrupted every five minutes to look at their wrist. That bet was correct. It was also, eventually, financially catastrophic for everyone who made it first.
The story of screenless wrist tracking isn't a WHOOP origin story. It's a story about a category that proved itself to the market, killed nearly every company that proved it, and is now being validated all over again by companies that arrived after the graveyard was full.